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The Top Ten Things Science Can't Explain

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-28 20:02

http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk//index.php/strange-but-true/item/top_ten_science_cant_explain?article_by_keyword=strange-but-true/item/top_ten_science_cant_explain

10. The WOW! signal
9. Pioneer's Funky Voyage
8. Female Orgasms
7. Dark Energy
6. The Speed of Light
5. The Placebo Effect
4. Cold Fusion
3. Yawning
2. Dark Matter
1. What Came Before, What Will Come After

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-28 21:45

And if we ignore what actual scientists have to say, science can't explain ANYTHING!

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 0:31

I have this fantasy that in fifty years dark energy will be filed in the same drawer as luminiferous aether and phlogiston.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 13:19

Yawning has been explained, lazy.
Yawning is caused by lack of oxygen in blood. A healthy morning exercise can cure that right up. If you find yourself about to yawn there are a few steps you can take:

To complete yawn process,
-Cover mouth for politeness when it public, it's about respecting other people's wishes by respecting your own wishes. *how would you like to be eating a great meal with a girl and see this guy yawning and bringing your food. But, being disrespectful is part of the darker side of human nature.

To stop the process,
-Use the under-knuckle of your thumb to rub the vein in your fore-head from between your brows up wards. This will provide more blood flow in the brain and cease a yawning reaction.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 13:20

And female orgasms? Please...if you haven't figured that out by now, we know which side of the spectrum you are on...lazy.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 13:24

Wait...wasn't that cold fusion demonstration in Japan a success?

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 15:57

>>3
seconded.

As of "What Came Before, What Will Come After" my wild guess is: heat death -> bose einstein condensate -> instant shrink (as in rubidium gas experiment) -> big bang 2

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 16:52

>>4

Uh, no. Yawning is the brain trying to cool itself.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 17:43

no it isn't

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 18:30

>>9
it's your brain trying to dethaw itself.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 19:40

>>8, guess again.
http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/901227084.html

Yawning

Q:  I get frequent yawning spells; I have had these for a few years now. Some times they occur after awakening or during the wee sleep hours. Does it mean that I'm not getting enough air to my lungs? I often doze off before bedtime when watching the late news, then can't seem to fall asleep in a long time. I never use sleeping pills. Why is the yawning so much at bedtime?



A:  A yawn is a semi-automatic reflex that originates in the brain stem in response to a lower level of oxygen in the brain. Yawning also occurs when a person loses interest in their surroundings, i.e gets bored. It does not necessarily indicate fatigue, although people do tend to yawn when they're sleepy. A study was done in which heart rate, skin effects, and muscle tension were measured in 30 young adults before, during, and after yawns. They found that yawning did increase their level of arousal for a short time.

Yawning is an action that occurs throughout the animal kingdom (cats in particular seem to yawn a great deal). In the late 1980s several studies were done in rats, and it was found that rats yawned more in the early morning before awakening and also when they were very hungry. Several different brain chemicals seem to be involved in yawning, but the mechanisms are still not understood.

For example, yawning seems to be contagious. Why is that? (Just reading about yawning made me yawn several times!) In your case, I doubt that a lack of oxygen is the main reason you yawn. Since your yawning spells seem to occur mainly around bedtime or during the middle of the night, they probably are related to being sleepy and groggy.


Article Created: 1998-07-23
Article Updated: 1998-08-23

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-29 19:43

...And how does oxygen get to the brain? O2 -> enter lungs -> transfered into blood cells ->travels to brain -> and cycles around to pick up more O2. What do you think about that, smartalike?

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-30 1:59

>10. The WOW! signal
There are numerous explainations, but most of them are useless until we see it happen again. Without repeated observations, we aren't able to do much with it. For all we know, it could've just been an illegal transmission bouncing off space debris or even just a recording malfunction. Rare, seemingly unique astronomical events don't get explained overnight, you know.

>9. Pioneer's Funky Voyage
Again, something that we just haven't had enough time or data points to do anything meaningful with yet. New Horizons will hopefully help us out.

>8. Female Orgasms
This one is just plain retarded. There isn't really anything TO explain. Saying that there MUST be a purpose to it is just plain stupid. Biology doesn't work that way. You can hypothesize about how it came about all you want, but in the end it's all meaningless because there's no way to prove anything yet. It's the same deal as all these "what's the evolutionary advantage of..." threads (sorry, I'm not here often, so I don't know if it's a meme now or not).

>7. Dark Energy
A strawman. We can only not explain Dark Energy if it actually exists. Dark Energy is only a placeholder for holes in one model, but there are plenty of other hypotheses to explain the observations.

>6. The Speed of Light
>According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, it is impossible to exceed the speed of light.
Yet another strawman. That's not what the theory says at all. What it says is that nothing with mass can accelerate to localized lightspeed. There are things like tachyons that (in theory) travel faster than light (though they have their own issues, like existing in imaginary (sqrt(-1)) time).

Anyway, no individual particle or energy wave in the experiment is actually moving faster than lightspeed.
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/053000sci-physics-light.html

>5. The Placebo Effect
The Placebo Effect is actually fairly well understood, considering how very very very little we know about the hideously complex interactions of the human brain. Numerous chemical reactions triggered by emotions and such as well as specific brain functions and regions have been linked to placebo responses. It basically boils down to the fact that the brain and consciousness have a LOT more control over body functions and health (or percieved health) than we previously thought. We know a lot about how very specific small scale things happen, but we just plain haven't had enough time to unravel the mysteries of the brain to say how it all fits together.

>4. Cold Fusion
The initial controversies surrounding cold fusion (read the wikipedia article for details) caused a serious mistrust of the whole subject and resulted in a severe lack of funding. If it exists at all, the only reason we don't understand it is because we haven't really given it a chance. More of a fault with politics than with Science.

>3. Yawning
See #8. There doesn't have to BE a singular or even GOOD reason. That's not how nature fucking works.

>2. Dark Matter
See #7. Can you tell I'm bored of this retarded bullshit?

>1. What Came Before, What Will Come After
We CAN explain what came before the Universe and what it's likely fate is. See: Big Bounce and Heat Death. Observations and changes in our laws of Physics may require abondoning these hypotheses, but we do have explainations. The other shit is Philosophy, not Science.

I guess my main theme here is that Science requires lots of time and effort. Saying "oh, look at all these things you can't explain" isn't fair because the more we know, the more questions there are. Science is a process, not an Answer. But still, that only applies to numbers 10, 9, 5, 4, and maybe the main point of 1. The rest are strawmen, blatent ignorance and misinformation.

/half-assed, lightly intoxicated rant

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-30 2:32

>>9 it's your brain trying to dethaw itself
>>trying to dethaw
>>dethaw

If you thaw something it melts.  Wouldn't de-thawing it make it freeze again?

Name: AnOnYmOuS 2U 2008-05-30 23:31

RedCream does the "Straw-Man" method every chance he gets...so much so that he's beginning to look a little grassy himself.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-31 0:23

This shows that science has done a good job, nothing but irrelevant items in the unexplained category.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-31 0:26

>>15
Maybe because strawmen are such a common tactic? It's certainly valid here for at least half of these things.

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-31 0:54

>>3
Why would you file 'dark energy' in the 'words you should try to sneak into conversations because they sound awesome' drawer?

Name: Anonymous 2008-05-31 2:02

>>18
moar liek "dork energy," amirite?

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